Upcycling for Grownups – We are looking for a big structure. The demands are quite modest; the rain should be shed or captured and the space underneath should feel like a great making space, cheerful, purposeful and flooded with natural light.

The space will have more in common with a yard than a building, and yet it is a strange thing, once you get beyond a set of tarpaulins on a cats cradle of broom sticks and hanging buckets, structures get SERIOUS. A simple predictable rain cover that will stay in place…in this case for four years needs a prodigious amount of stiff supporting structure and even then it is tricky. There needs to be a way of getting some big objects in and out of the space and that will of course be the route the wind takes as well.

>>The first challenge is to stop your flitched cover flying away.

>>The second challenge is to make something surprising elegant and witty with scrap

This will involved assembling the materials your choose to use from the competition spreadsheet in a way that makes sense, from the micro to the macro and back again, so that the image of making hangs like an inspiration over makers below. This is course all to do with joints and those joints will have their own sweet logic which will start dictating the geometry of the whole.

When you meet these two challenges you will have something to share. Building tech has developed m•u•c•h m•o•r•e s•l•o•w•l•y than digital tech and it seems to take an age for one country in Europe to discover and import the clever vernacular tricks or modern construction techniques of a neighbour…no matter how many problems could be solved. Flitched will act as an accelerator in construction breaking through conservative thinking and setting up new Euro norms which will assume the legitimate role for scrap in construction. Waste materials will act as a spring board to new forms of additive construction, a construction that accepts it is always in the process of becoming, a construction that is part of a loop in constant repair guided by a poetic tectonic imagination as diverse as the makers will have it.

So starting with some fierce pragmaticism don’t worry if you find yourselves drifting into the poetic logic best exemplified by CJ Lim and his school.